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As for the level of advancement of the audio engine, it's not too bad. I need to do some more (controlled) tests, but it seems to be pretty good. It may need some limited modification/enhancement to make Thief gameplay more challenging/fun.

Don't get me wrong; it's not perfect out-of-the-box for a Thief-style game. But with a few tweaks here and there, it'll get there.

Audio shouldn't be that big a problem on the Doom3 engine... And the be honest, i'm puzzlede why you think TUT's sound propagation was so good... Mostly it just used normal UT radial radius sounds, so the sounds could be heard by everyone inside a certain radius of the origin. People walking around, making noise, opening doors and so could be heard all the way through a building, regardless of walls... Making it difficult to make a "Silent entrance"

Anyways, the bigger problem for this mod is probarly getting ai to be able to tell if a player is hidden or not... With it being dynamic light and all, and Doom 3 monsters all having night vision this could prove very difficult.
And be careful not make this game darker then Doom3... hard enough to find around in doom3, but seeing how thieves love shadows and forgot their flashlight it could become a rather... dark experience.

The AI will be the biggie, true. But it looks like Id has built a great deal of flexibility into the engine. Even without the SDK, we can already play around with different ways the AI can become aware of players.

Main trick is that we use pathnodes (which are used by AI to navigate the level) to propagate dynamic sound events, so sounds travel a bit more realistically.

That is so awesome.

Originally Posted by Teh-Builder

...And the be honest, i'm puzzlede why you think TUT's sound propagation was so good... Mostly it just used normal UT radial radius sounds, so the sounds could be heard by everyone inside a certain radius of the origin. People walking around, making noise, opening doors and so could be heard all the way through a building, regardless of walls... Making it difficult to make a "Silent entrance"
...

True, the flaw is that sound isn't stopped by walls, but as oRGy said, the sound actualy DOES propagate - the point I'm making is that the existing engine wasn't designed with sound propagation in mind, and the Thievery UT creators actually implemented a form of sound propagation. (...Can you do a better job?) It's still a good example of what can be done, and we can learn from how they did it.

And be careful not make this game darker then Doom3... hard enough to find around in doom3, but seeing how thieves love shadows and forgot their flashlight it could become a rather... dark experience.

that makes me worried a little bit. in doom 3... the shadows are so dark, it looks like it's not even rendering what is in the shadows.. i mean you can't see it at all. does this mean that anything completely dark in that engine will do the same? i.e. if you are in full shadow you won't be able to see ANYTHING and that would be bad

No, it renders what's in the shadows. Otherwise the flashlight effect wouldn't work.

The worst thing about the Doom 3 engine is that it doesn't like having more than 2 or 3 lightsources on a single surface. 1 is optimal, 2 or 3 is alright, but anything above that and performance starts to suffer. I don't see the engine being used for really bright games anytime soon...but for Thief it's perfect.

But besides that there is one really cool thing I can see getting alot of use from...lights can project images. Say you want to have a shadow of a tree whipping around in the wind on a wall across a window, all you have to do is get someone to draw a black and white animated image (or green or red or blue or even full color..doesn't matter), apply it to a light and bam...there's your spooky tree shadow. The best example of this is the flashlight, which is a portable lightsource that's projecting a lens distortion image.

But this does prove Vunk was right about one thing, some of the shadows were faked...mostly what you see from gratelights and whatnot. The best way to tell is to look at how harsh and defined the shadows are.

AI light/dark perception is handled in probably the same way as in Thief. Unless you mean how the bots light up flares in dark areas, which is just applying the vis check to them as well as on Thieves.

I'm curious as to how you ended up doing that, or how you think it was done in Dark. The obvious resolve to me would be to rely on the lightgird - which is used for the vertex lighting. What i ended up doing, with Quake III's engine (since i'd need the full source to get at the lightgrid data), was some real-time tracing from each object to the light sources. I imagine they'll need to do something like that as well with Doom III's engine, although i'm pretty sure id's already got some player visibility calculation in there... so maybe not.

Originally Posted by Fingernail

Doom 3 has Surround sound EAX 4, so one assumes it's already pretty much in place.

You do realize that EAX has nothing to do with actual sound propogation, right (it simpily handles acoustical effects)? I seriously doubt that Doom III already has any kind of actual propagation system, as it is, to be honest.

You do realize that EAX has nothing to do with actual sound propogation, right (it simpily handles acoustical effects)? I seriously doubt that Doom III already has any kind of actual propagation system, as it is, to be honest.

So true. I can't beleive I missed Fingernail's EAX & sound propagation statement (especially since it was quoted enough times).

Here's some info on what EAX 4 does;http://www.soundblaster.com/resource...cleid=89&cat=3
Basically, Occlusion and Obstruction, to mimic the way sound SOUNDS when its coming through or around objects (not the same as propagation), and multi-reverb effects - previously, you would only hear the one reverb effect - stand in a hallway, and everything echoes like its in a hallway, stand in a bathroom, and everything echos like its in a bathroom.
Multi-reverb effects means this limitation isn't there anymore - fire a shot in a hallway, and the gunshot echoes like its in the hallway, then, the bullet hits the wall in the bathroom, and echoes like its in the bathroom (rather than in the hallway, just because you're standing in it).

I'm curious as to how you ended up doing that, or how you think it was done in Dark. The obvious resolve to me would be to rely on the lightgird - which is used for the vertex lighting. What i ended up doing, with Quake III's engine (since i'd need the full source to get at the lightgrid data), was some real-time tracing from each object to the light sources. I imagine they'll need to do something like that as well with Doom III's engine, although i'm pretty sure id's already got some player visibility calculation in there... so maybe not.
t.

The unreal engine keeps track of how much light a lightsource puts onto an actor, or there was simply added a thingi to players that would detect the amount of light.

The unreal engine keeps track of how much light a lightsource puts onto an actor, or there was simply added a thingi to players that would detect the amount of light.

Ah, right... you have to code for Unreal in that pussy UnrealScript, huh?

Well, on a more technical level, it sounds like the light data is probably comming from a "lightgrid" kind of system, which gets setup when you process the lighting. It stores the light intensity levels in 3d space, at each "grid point", which is generally done so the renderer knows how to light up models. Using the already existing data is the efficient way of doing it - what i had to do was kind of a hack, unfortunatly.

Um.. wow! I was not expecting this (so soon, if at all!) I must admit, I fell to the "yeah, yeah, sher, sher" mindset about a T3 mod for D3, but I've gotta echo what others have said - it looks great, and you seem to be getting on it fast. Keep up the great work. A model already? Wow.

Oh, and Renz, re: your level shot: OMFG.

Edit: Hey, I don't have D3 (yet) but... don't you go back and forth between levels? Like right at the beginning, there's a mars sequence or something and then you go back where you came from before all goes wrong? And if so, is that loading zones? It would be good if they're there as an option (back to the "evil loading zones effectively *allow* for IMMENSE missions" argument).

Yup. Even though Doom 3 doesn't use 2 way loading zones, they could be easily implemented in any mod. All you'd have to do is make a gateway back into the map you were in previously, like flipping a switch on one side then doing the same thing when you're on the other to move back.

I'm toying with the idea of putting them in my maps cuz, like you said, you could make some massive and really detailed missions by using em. Thing is Doom 3 isn't exactly what I'd call a quick loading game, so I'll have to weigh the pros and cons carefully.

If anything I might set it up like a seperate exterior/interior type deal.

Well, what did you mean by propagation? In the physics sense, this is just how sound travels through air. Since computer games do not literally simulate every molecule of air, there has to be some technical approximation based on much simpler laws.

EAX would mean, as stated, that occlusion and distance would effect the sounds. As it turns out, the current build of the Doom 3 engine does not have EAX support.

However, the great thing about Doom 3 is it's flexibility. As with all ID engines.